I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.
On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
That would depend on the category of the waste:
- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste
where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).
https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...
You can just bury it deep in a mountain
Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:
As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)
Same wiki.
Ad hominem. Criticize the argument. Your opinion about Shellenberger or even his other opinions are irrelevant.
I don't particularly like him, but that does not mean all his points are invalid.
As for the validity of his statements, please read his Congressional Testimonies in said wiki and see if that changes your mind.
> Nuclear waste is small and solid
As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.
Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.
I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.
> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.
Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.
> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.
Quote:
> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.
Don't talk about Americans that way!
More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.
So imo not really a political problem.
It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:
> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.
So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.
[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...
Vs. coal?
Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)
-----
Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:
> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.
Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:
Yes, utility solar is very safe. Unfortunately rooftop solar is much more dangerous and also much, much more costly. So one has to wonder why anyone supports the massive subsidies that are still given to rooftop solar.
Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.
Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.
Yes.
(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)
We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.
> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).
Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.
Ignoring the hard part and saying the aluminum exists is not even wrong, it's counterproductive. Until you solve the political component the materials might as well all be sitting on pallets in a warehouse, it doesn't help any.
* assuming I guessed the correct continent when you wrote "the west coast".
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
It’s a very semantic claim.
They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.
Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).
But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).
Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors
BTW - The US Navy has lost 2 nuclear submarines, which are still being periodically monitored - page 7 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/NT-25-1%2...
Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.
Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.
China which is fairly sensible on this stuff and which plans to be world's largest nuclear producer by 2035 actually added 1GW of nuclear and ~300GW of solar last year because it's cheaper.
I'll give you maintaining existing nuclear makes sense. But as a British tax payer the cost of our upcoming Hinkley C is eye watering (£48bn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)
"2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024"
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal...
It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies.
The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes.
The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.
Nuclear power would help to solve these problems, because it isn't intermittent.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.
Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.
New Zealand is contemplating a large project (didn’t think we into infrastructure any more) which is considerably more capacity than a few hours.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/17/the-lake-onslow-pumped-hyd...
https://blackout-news.de/en/news/electricity-prices-in-germa...
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords.
There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.
I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.
Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349938542_Disease_b...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.
There is a certain threshold for radiation exposure where if exceeded the animal isn't deemed safe for consumption anymore. The vast majority of these cases are from boars in certain areas of Germany nowadays and affect less than 1% of all killed boars [1] [2].
[1]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...
[2]: https://www.wildtierschutz-deutschland.de/_files/ugd/173a38_...
Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).
And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).
Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.
A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.
We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.
Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.
Happy for other examples that would demonstrate nuance, but that isn't it.
Locally there is opposition to gold mining. People in the region oppose it and with a broad definition of ‘NIMBY’ you’d be right. But neighbouring valley, town, region etc is a broad definition.
But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No.
Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No.
Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No.
Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.
They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world.
Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2)
We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.
Just look at the statistics. E. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...
To say that they're _potentially_ safe by waving at the US Navy is a fallacy for several reasons.
1. It's p-hacking. E. g. with the same technology the Soviets destroyed five of their reactors.
2. The world of civilian operators is completely incomparable.
3. Civilian power plants use different technologies.
> Waste is mostly a solved problem.
Not as far as I know. In Germany, for example, the search for a final disposal site is still completely open-ended, and the first final disposal site will not open until 2074 at the earliest, while, at the same time, the already collapsed storage facilities consume an enormous amount of money. I personally think it is absurd to assume that an underground nuclear waste storage facility can be operated safely over geological time scales. Needless to say there isn't even a single one worldwide for highly radioactive waste.
And to compare them with coal plants is classical whataboutism. "They can't be bad, because I found something other that's bad as well."
You're right about the minable uranium. That has changed over the last years, so the current estimate is 2080 in a high demand scenario.
But your criticism about the externalized costs falls short as well. Regarding the externalized costs, that is really hard to quantify and I don't know of reliable estimations. How do you want to come up with a number if you don't even know if humans still exist on the planet at that time?
What is clear is that for nuclear energy the majority of the costs is externalized. The bulk of the costs stem from the decommissioning of power plants, final disposal, and accident-related expenses. All three are typically passed on entirely to taxpayers.
The former German vice chancellor even said, he would agree [to build a new nuclear power plant] if <political opponent> found a private operator willing to build a nuclear power plant entirely without government guarantees, subsidies, or liability coverage.
> And to compare them with coal plants is classical whataboutism. "They can't be bad, because I found something other that's bad as well."
I disagree, I am saying we should replace coal with something that is orders of magnitude safer. Nation who will disregard nuclear will be stuck with coal/nat gas for a very long time. For most of the world there aren't even theoretical models for getting to 100% wind/solar if stable grid is required with CURRENT demand, let alone future demand.
I don't have a source handy but I disagree we only have supply until 2080. Maybe with current known reserves and without reprocessing.
Germany won't find a story site because they don't want to find one. They are looking for something perfect, that is guaranteed to last 1000s of years. Meanwhile, waste water from mining and refining is just dumped in old quarries, lakes, the ocean. PFAS just gets dumped everywhere. All kinds of toxic waste that lasts forever, just dumped no one cares. But when its about nuclear waste suddenly everything has to be secured against the apocalypse.
Look we can argue about this forever, meanwhile China is building more plants that whole west combined and in a few decades they will be energy independent using 100% clean energy.
Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.
E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
"Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran" called for Germany to move towards "coal+gas" or "coal+solar" scenario. Only later were added any consideration for climate change, but the highest priority, the big evil, was nuclear technology.
Greenpeace has it's roots also in the opposition to underground nuclear weapon tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins
The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
"Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network.
https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R...
All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war.
And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped.
https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.
Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?
So this myth is what you need to tell yourself we need nuclear?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE
It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW
80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.
It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"
They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.
It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.
The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.
Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.
This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
It isn't imaginary. Korea and China prove it is possible to build nuclear reactors for reasonable cost when you don't have endless irrational legal opposition that makes them take much longer to build. What IS imaginary is multi-day grid scale storage. All BES are designed with at most 4 hour capacity.
I didn't handwaved away the study I carefully pointed out how it is systematically biased against nuclear which isn't surprising considering how anti-nuclear the authors are.
Denmark isn't nearly as hard of a case as you think because it has some of the most reliable off shore wind power available.
And it's conclusion about Denmark, if correct, cannot be generalized to the rest of the world. You have to have dispatchable power in an electrical grid and that has to come from gas, coal, or nuclear.
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.
I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
Compare:
If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine.
It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.
That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
> unpopular with experts
How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?
Fundamentally, unless you know the Navy's answer and can apply it to override those lawsuits, it doesn't matter: politics can't be wished away just because the wrong people have power.
> The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.
Increasingly not; as with all things, you have to aim for where the ball will be rather than where it is, and for this topic that implies that for any given proposed new gas (or nuclear) plant you have to ask about the alternatives, which also include "how fast you we build energy storage, and what would it cost?"
Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.
"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"
Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.
(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).
Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years.
And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.
And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships.
What's frustrating in this discussion is policy and management decisions made 50 years ago are assumed to be the steady-state immutable reality in western countries.
My argument is not that nuclear is the best economic play. It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
>was originally slated for completion in 2020.
>But repeated delays pushed back full commercial operations until 2024, when the fourth and final unit came online. The setbacks drove up costs and eroded profitability.
What could have caused delays in 2019 ~ 2020 time frame?
It would be nice to see a postmortem.
It is simple: some environmental laws are a legitimate ask from some people, whether you or I agree with the ask itself. It has nothing to do with the nuclear, it is about your argument framing the existence of environmental laws as the reason it does not work. If nuclear cannot work well in some countries because in some countries there are people who ask legitimate things, the problem is not these people, the problem is that the nuclear model is not adapted to the reality of these countries.
But again, as I've said, it is not even the case: the difficulties with nuclear are not limited to "some environmentalist".
> It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.
That does not make sense. If you want to write a software that does something, you don't just spinning up Linux, Windows, Mac, and start writing code in Java, C++, python, typescript, erlang, ... at the same time. What you do is: you write a decision matrix, score it, and _choose one strategy_.
In the context of the climate crisis, the strategy can mix different technologies ... or not. The fact that it does not does not mean that this particular strategy is worse than another. In particular, budgets are obviously limited, so spending X$ on project A may lead to a successful project A while spending X/2$ on project A and X/2$ project B may lead to both projects A and B failing. (and if you don't think it's true, just increase the number N of projects until X/N$ is ridiculously too small to do anything. According to your sentence, you said you should be spinning up every options all at once as aggressively as you can, so you cannot do only N-1 projects, you need to split your money amongst the N projects).
When it comes to climate change, I was 100% pro-nuclear 20 years ago. Now, in some countries, it is too often a money pit (not because of regulation or the bad environmentalists) that is wasting money that could have helped the climate. If you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should spend your time, money and energy to real solutions instead of achieving nothing by trying to do everything all at once without a plan.
I truly can’t comprehend where this massive boner for new built nuclear power comes from. Sci-fi?
You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.
Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.
Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).
Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables, only makes sense in a few geographic locations. Not all, or even most!
Even keeping old reactors running gets super expensive as they get past their designed lifetimes, and very often doesn't make sense.
The engineering is indeed already done for electricity, and storage and renewables are cheap and getting cheaper. Nuclear is at best staying the same high cost, and getting more expensive is these large construction projects rise due to Baumol's cost disease.
Opposing more nuclear in the US in the 1980s wasn't fully irrational, the US managerial class have way overbuilt nuclear and we didn't need all the electricity. Then we didn't have much growth in
The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living, it's the anti-EV and anti-battery advocates, and to some degree it's retrofitting the wide variety of highly-cost-sensitive industries, such as steel or fertilizer or concrete, to use carbon neutral methods. Or maybe sustainable aviation fuel.
Nuclear had it's chance to be a big contributor to climate action back in the mid 2000s and 2010s, it failed that challenge in Georgia at Vogtle, in South Carolnia at Summer, in the UK at Hinkley Point C, in France in Flamanville, and in Finland an Olkiluoto. Every one of those failures is a very good reason for a climate activist to oppose nuclear.
All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.
Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.
If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.
If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction.
Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
This is not the cheaper option.
You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility.
What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible.
> There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.
Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year.
So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production.
The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible.
To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries.
You don't know the exact
> To put this in perspective, global daily electricity demand is 60,000 GWh. Of the ~2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025, only ~300 GWh was used for grid storage. Most of it went to EVs.
What's your implication here? If you are trying to say this means that batteries can never scale, it's certainly not making that point. Even the distinction between grid and EVs is immaterial, because where do EVs get their power? The grid. That's all flexible demand, that can be shifted a huge amount.
> Battery production costs are already dominated by the cost of anode and cathode material. The bottleneck is resource extraction. And the nature of scaling resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are extracted first, and increasing producing involves reaching for the more and more difficult to access reserves.
The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.
Unlike oil, we are in the early days of discovery for battery materials, because we never looked for them before. Just recently fracking in the southeast quarter of the US turned out to be producing a fair amount of lithium, which nobody had bothered to even investigate before.
Batteries are a new technology, not an old technology like oil, and the dynamics are far different. One can't simply recycle reasoning that applies in oil without examining the first princiles.
> Even if production continues to rise, any serious investment into battery grid storage will delay EV adoption as batteries are diverted to grid storage instead of EVs.
"Even if" is a preposterous thing to say, of course it will!
EVs are higher value destination for grid batteries, so more batteries will go towards that right now. And as long as there might be "diversion" as you say, there is need for more production capacity, and production capacity will expand.
Such as? Is your proposal that we use lead acid batteries instead of lithium based batteries? Those have much shorter lifespans, which drives up cost. Sodium batteries? 9 GWh of sodium batteries were shipped in 2025.
To be blunt, you're just hand waving away the massive disparity in scale between battery production and the storage demands of a predominantly wind and solar grid.
We’re seeing the Cambrian explosion of battery technology. From early BEVs utilizing the highest performance to even deliver a viable product to a plethora of options depending on your use case.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/25/google-to-deploy-worl...
Wasting trillions of tax money and decades of opportunity cost on new built nuclear handouts is extremely shortsighted.
Of course, there's no guarantee that any of those fission ideas will actually pan out. Likewise with these battery chemistries. Investing loads of money into intermittent sources with just the hope that some future battery chemistry will solve storage at grid scale is not what I'd call a wise plan.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Anybody who over the past few decades has been saying that we could not deploy batteries on a massive scale needs to reevaluate their bad assumptions, because they are wrong, and moreover we should not trust any of their current assessments until they can reconcile what they got wrong. The tech curves of batteries have been clear for decades, this tech development should not have been unexpected.
* The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day
* The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day.
* Global battery production in 2025 was ~1,600 GWh, of which 300 GWh was used for grid storage [1].
At our present production rates, it'll take 100 years to provision 12 hours worth of storage at 300 GWh per year. Batter production is set to increase to 6.8 TWh per year [2], but only 12% of that is predicted to go to grid storage, or about 800 GWh per year. Even at 2035 rates, we're looking at 37 years of production to fill 12 hours of storage (12 hour of electricity storage for 2025 electricity demand rates, which will be higher in 2035).
Yes, batteries are being deployed at a massive scale today. But electricity generation is on an even more massive scale that dwarfs battery production rates.
1. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/global-lithium-...
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
Mmmhmm, grid scale deployment is not grid scale now? You are redefining terms, which means you don't work in the field and are not at all familiar with the field, yet you make broad and sweep proclamations of incredulity that have no factual backing, and we are supposed to trust you purely on judgement?
You cite last year's deployment rate, without noting a massive increase in planned deployments for this year. You neglect to cite the year before it, which was much smaller. You looking at a puck headed to the goal, under a continuous accelerant force, and saying, "the puck is here, therefore it will never hit the goal." That's a ridiculous thing to assert, because you don't hold that afactual standard for any other technology, just batteries, yet seem to understand that all other technologies have continually changing amounts of producition.
BTW, your link is "demand" and disagrees with most other sources.
> At our present production rates
That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
If nuclear has 0 GW new this year, how do you think it could ever get to 2GW/year, right?
You have no reasons for these strange beliefs that defy data and trends, you just assert incredulity. It's completely irrational.
I'm not expecting readers to trust me purely on judgement, I'm expecting them to do the math and realize that battery storage deployment and electricity demand are multiple orders of magnitude off, even with the projected increases in battery projection.
> That kind of says it all, doesn't it? You think that present production rates are indicative of future production rates, which is an insane statement.
Again, I did cite the projected production figures for 2035. Did you miss that part?
Battery technology seems like a proven technology to me?
What's the annual production figures for iron air batteries, flow batteries, etc.? Sodium batteries are at 9 GWh delivered in 2025. Google tells me that flow battery capacity is 500 MWh to 1 GWh, but doesn't provide any figures on actual production deliveries (production capacity is not the same as actual delivered production). There are no iron air battery facilities currently in production, with the earliest plant trying to open in 2028 with 500 MWh per year annual production.
None of your suggestions are remotely close to operating at grid scale, and there is zero guarantee that any of them will prove more feasible than lithium based battery chemistry.
Meanwhile, the statement that "fusion has been achieved in a lab" is optimism and wishful thinking beyond words. What energy return did that get? What was the cost? When will there be GE of generation, mic less basic safety engineering?
Those who advocate against the shipping reality of batteries, and moreover assume that they will get more expensive, are not using numerical thinking and are not thinking like scientists, engineers, or technologists. They are merely rooting for a tech like a sports team. Nuclear does not need any more fans, it needs engineers and scientists that can achieve some sort of radical breakthrough that makes it a desirable tech.
You're inventing a straw man that's easier for you to attack.
No goalposts are being moved. My point was, and still is, that batteries do not presently scale sufficiently to make a predominantly wind and solar grid feasible, and our current projections even a decade out do not see them scale to that point either.
We don't know if some breakthrough in battery chemistry will make it scale. Could such a breakthrough transpire? Sure. But will it happen? We don't know. And thus we should not gamble massive infrastructure spending on the assumption that this breakthrough will happen.
What’s the source on this? I just googled it, and the sources I see are saying 5TWh by 2036, with increasing supply chain risks over time…
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-lithium-ion-battery-ca...
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...
I heard the projection on a podcast from a battery builder (maybe Form Energy's CEO?) in 2021 that we were at 200-300 GWh in 2021, and would have 2-3 TWh 2026, and 20-30 TWh in 2031. His "naive" prediction was correct, all the other projections have been flat wrong.
Another example, sci fi author Ramez Naam in 2020 reviewed his prior projections from 2011 and 2015 here:
https://www.rameznaam.com/p/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-...
Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.
We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.
To reiterate, this is just for 12 hours of storage. Seasonal fluctuations can depress renewable generation for days or even weeks.
1. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...
BESS increased 45% y/y in 2025, and is looking like higher growth than that in 2026 already ~60% (1). Im optimistic that the mckinsey conservative linear estimates of growth are missing the s-curve of scaling new tech, just like they did for solar. They only have to be wrong by a little y/y and we get to 1000ghw a year by 2030 (note, they released a more recent study that pulled 800gwh/year in to closer to 2030 [2], the previous study was already too conservative) . At 1twh a year we're seriously chipping away at emissions, we're done in 15 years if nothing else changes (which of course it will, both on the demand and supply side). Still, thats actually incredible!
1 https://www.energy-storage.news/over-17gwh-of-bess-deployed-... 2 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/ba...
The projections for battery growth might be off, sure. But it's also possible the growth is a little bit under the projections year over year, and then we're looking at much less battery production five years. You're invoking uncertainty, but only considering it in one direction.
Yes, im explicitly considering it only in one direction, as I said I’m optimistic. I have seen plenty of data, my own & others reasoning that leads me to believe in the optimistic case here.
EDIT: look at the graph in that second McKinsey link. Look at the step for 2024, and then the massive step for 2025. And then they project much tinier steps for 26 and beyond? That’s obviously nonsense. And we can tell it’s nonsense as the number for 26 are coming in at another 60% increase y/y, and all reports point to huge increases in deployed capacity this year. And they have it at like 20%. Cmon, that’s nonsense.
Rather than just proclaiming the projection as "nonsense" it'd be a lot more productive if you shared an alternate projection and explained why it's methods are superior.
And this also disregards that second life automotive batteries are incredibly hot on the market. All those TWh of batteries will become available for stationary use when the cars are scrapped.
Maybe not in western markets due to labor costs, but definitely in developing economies.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization.
Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.
The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.
And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.
The difference is that nuclear will keep running at night, in the winter, regardless of how strong the wind is blowing. A cheap, but intermittent source of carbon-free energy is not comparable on a dollar-by-dollar basis to a non-intermittent source of carbon-free energy.
The common retort is to use batteries, but let's put this in perspective: France uses 1,219 GWh of electricity daily (note that this is just electricity and doesn't include things like transportation, fuels in smelters, chemical feedstock etc.). 12 hours of storage would be 600 GWh. Seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar are even more extreme, and might need days worth of stored energy. But let's be humble and just see what it'll take to provision 12 hours:
At $150/kWh that'll be 90 billion dollars. These batteries will be good for 2,000 to 5,000 cycles. Let's say 4,000, so it has an 11 year life span. Over the course of 55 years that'd cost $450 billion. Just for the storage, mind you, France has to build the renewable generation on top of the storage.
On the flip side, the Flamanville Nuclear plant has a lifespan of 60 years. You could build 12 Flamanville nuclear plants and satisfy 100% of France's electricity demand. At €19 billion euros, or about $22 billion USD building 12 Flamanville plants would work out to $264 billion. The cost of storage to even out intermittent sources is much more expensive than just building the nuclear plants.
Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].
With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].
So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.
[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/02/lessons-from-france...
Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.
Within a generation costs lowered, but between generations they exploded.
And the reductions were to small to make a dent in how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is in 2026.
I'll be sure to read oil daily about the benefits of LNG plants too.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.
The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.
People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.
The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.
As always this is a political problem, not a technical or economic one.
The Hollande government put a law on the books that made it illegal to increase nuclear generating capacity beyond the then-installed 63.2 GW
The only way they were even allowed to build/operate the single EPR in Flamanville was to shut down two old reactors in Fessenheim. Even that was questionable, but shutting down more perfectly fine reactors would be economically suicidal.
That law was only rescinded in 2023 (by 2/3 majority), and so after that they began plans for the 14 EPR2s, six now, eight later.
Now that that is in place (and France currently has more electricity than they need), the newest energy strategy calls for massive reductions in solar and wind build outs.
https://www.consultations-publiques.developpement-durable.go...
Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example of this: the plants are so much more expensive per megawatt than what the navy builds day-in-day-out because of 1) lawsuits every step of the way 2) regulatory paralysis and 3) we haven't been doing it for 50 years so the talent and patterns aren't there.
Which directly contributes to your later point:
> We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi
I wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi. Nor would I consider the ongoing rollout of reactors in China, which haven't seen the cost overruns of western nations, scifi. I'd consider those things consequences of the systems they were developed in. China's power plants have come in at about $2M/megawatt, which is coincidentally almost exactly what the US navy spends on their reactors and appears to be the cost of doing business in a well functioning environment. Solar is cheaper in the buildout (~$1M/megawatt), but not nearly to the extent that opponents of nuclear have made it out to be. It turns out when you make it almost impossible to do something, it gets really expensive!
These are problems we could solve through policy, but the lasting gift of the Boomer generation's rise to power and refusal to relinquish it is that US policy, industry, regulatory structure, and infrastructure were largely frozen-in-time 50 years ago and have been trying to cope with the crumbling shell of that ever since.
Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.
We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.
That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that really something to aspire to?
Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.
Given the current geopolitical trajectories we are going to be adopting their policies one way or another.
Similarly the US navy does not have to produce commercially viable nuclear power on an all in cost basis. Different goals, different situation.
I'm old enough to have heard that in every decade since the 90s.
>But this time it's different!
Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
What you haven't heard every decade since the 90s is that storage, solar, and wind are cheaper than nuclear. Technology has changed. We're no longer running 486dx or pentiums, we have something better.
>> But this time it's different!
I didn't say that, and I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you think energy technology is not going through a massive disruption, completely different than the 1990s, or 2000s?
> Yes, we're much closer to climate change making the industrial supply chains for building a nuclear power plant impossible. If we don't do it in the next 20 years our only choice is going to be what seasoning to use on human flesh.
This is very cryptic. Climate change doesn't threaten the industrial supply chains for nuclear, it does threaten the standard cooling sources though, such as rivers and other aquatic ecosystems. "If we don't do it" not sure what the "it" is bet no path leads to cannibalism.